Is man a savage at heart, skinned o'er with fragile Manners? Or is savagery but a faint taint in the natural man's gentility, which erupts now and again like pimples on an angel's arse? ~John Barth, The Sot-Weed Factor, 1960
Evolution: one small step for man, one giant leap backward for mankind. ~Terri Guillemets
God has given a great deal to man, but man would like something from man. ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin
I sometimes think of what future historians will say of us. A single sentence will suffice for modern man: He fornicated and read the papers. ~Albert Camus
Man, when he is merely what he seems to be, is almost nothing. ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin
Give a man secure possession of a bleak rock, and he will turn it into a garden; give him nine years' lease of a garden, and he will convert it into a desert. ~Arthur Young, Travels in France, 1792
Occident: The part of the world lying west (or east) of the Orient. It is largely inhabited by Christians, a powerful subtribe of the Hypocrites, whose principal industries are murder and cheating, which they are pleased to call "war" and "commerce." These, also, are the principal industries of the Orient. ~Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary
Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they ought to be. ~William Hazlitt, The English Comic Writers, 1819
Nature is neutral. Man has wrested from nature the power to make the world a desert or to make the deserts bloom. There is no evil in the atom; only in men's souls. ~Adlai Stevenson
A simple and irrefutable argument to knock creationism on its ass: (1) Humans are a mistake - subproof: opposable thumbs and enlarged brain capacity are the combined number one factor in the increasingly speedy destruction of planet Earth. (2) God doesn't make mistakes. (3) Therefore, God couldn't have created people. ~Cassus Garrulitas
Man talks about everything, and he talks about everything as though the understanding of everything were all inside him. ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin
My dog is usually pleased with what I do, because she is not infected with the concept of what I "should" be doing. ~Lonzo Idolswine
Man will do many things to get himself loved; he will do all things to get himself envied. ~Mark Twain, Following the Equator, 1897
We are all parasites; we humans, the greatest. ~Martin H. Fischer
Suppose some mathematical creature from the moon were to reckon up the human body; he would at once see that the essential thing about it was that it was duplicate. A man is two men, he on the right exactly resembling him on the left. Having noted that there was an arm on the right and one on the left, a leg on the right and one on the left, he might go further and still find on each side the same number of fingers, the same number of toes, twin eyes, twin ears, twin nostrils, and even twin lobes of the brain. At last he would take it as a law; and then, where he found a heart on one side, would deduce that there was another heart on the other. And just then, where he most felt he was right, he would be wrong. ~Gilbert Keith Chesterton, "The Paradoxes of Christianity," Orthodoxy
It is the nature of mortals to kick a fallen man. ~Aeschylus, Agamemnon
God is less careful than General Motors, for He floods the world with factory rejects. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960
So there he is at last. Man on the moon. The poor magnificent bungler! He can't even get to the office without undergoing the agonies of the damned, but give him a little metal, a few chemicals, some wire and twenty or thirty billion dollars and vroom! there he is, up on a rock a quarter of a million miles up in the sky. ~Russell Baker, New York Times, 21 July 1969
Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem which he has to solve. ~Erich Fromm, Man for Himself, 1947
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